With Snow Leopard finally been given a release date and a price, the comparisons with Windows 7 are starting to pop up all over the place, especially focussing on the price aspect of things. While Apple's move to price Snow Leopard at 29 USD for Leopard owners is a very welcome one, the move doesn't mean that Microsoft is getting a price beating from Apple.

I was going to post a comment as soon as I read Thom's opinion that Win 7 Windows Explorer has been "improved" because for me, the new "improved" Windows Explorer is one the main reasons why I will not be moving to Win 7 from XP. (Lack of a "Classic" Start Menu, the new and broken Search (mal-)function, and the downright offensive Once-Click crap are some others.)

The new Explorer is pretty much nothing but severely reduced functionality and difficult navigation. The status bar is even less useful than before; the one-click functionality - which can not be reverted back to standard pre-Win7 behaviour - is not unlike a personal affront: I have been doing it one way for 15 years and now have to relearn it, for no benefit whatsoever. This new functionality has caused me nothing but problems on the desktop and in Explorer. Thanks to the light-gray font in the Folder Pane, using Win Explorer is now a constant eyestrain. The absence of vertical lines in the Tree Pane make it almost impossible to understand complex folder structures.

Not being able to right-click on a folder or drive and call up a search dialog from a context menu is a real problem because this has been replaced by a search box at the top of the GUI... which is kind of a throwback to the long-ago depreciated "Multiple Document Interface" which separated the menu bar from the window it was controlling. To me, this is about a retrograde, obtuse, and awkward a way of building a GUI as can be conceived. The "point your cursor at a file or folder and wait a moment and the focus will shift to highlight that item" is horrible: Microsoft says Win7 has "less clicking" but what they actually need to say is "Win 7 - Less Clicking, More Waiting". I can no longer work at MY speed, I must work with constant pauses so that the computer can catch up. And now almost every part of the file pane is live, and I have to be careful about where I rest the cursor...

Well, I could go on, but my initial impression is this: For anyone who has to do any significant amount of file management, Win 7 is absolutely unworkable unless you want to invest in a decent replacement for the new Windows Explorer. (And a slavish clone of XP's Windows Explorer would be perfectly acceptable, even though that too has a few obvious flaws...)

One the other hand, I really do not need to upgrade and can put it off until such time as my main apps no longer support XP. "Main apps," you know, the apps for the sake of which I have a computer in the first place. And that will be quite a few years yet.